Vanity Fair supports One Young World

Leading Lights

At a time of crisis for global leadership, 1,300 dynamic young voices gathered in Ottawa at the One Young World summit. Their mission? To join their powerful predecessors and debate, together, solutions for the world’s most pressing problems. FATIMA BHUTTO was there

Left to right: Professor Muhammad Yunus, One Young World co-founders Kate Robertson and David Jones, Mary Robinson, Justin Trudeau, Emma Watson and Kofi Annan

The Museum of Natural History, which stands on the intersection betw­een Ottawa and Quebec, typ­ifies the beauty of Canada’s uninterr­upted land­scape. Beside the river, in a rolling park of thick, young grass under a bright blue sky, Mary Robinson, the first female president of Ireland and a former UN high commissioner for Human Rights, stands in the shadow of the museum and chats amiably to Loujain al-Hathloul. Loujain is 27 years old and spent 73 days in prison in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, for her role in the campaign to allow women to drive.

This scene—former president and young activist standing shoulder-to-shoulder—is not unusual at One Young World, a UK-based charity founded in 2009 by Kate Robertson and David Jones that invites young people under the age of 30 from across the globe to attend an annual summit at which they mingle with older Counsellors—people who have led in the fields of business, politics, media and civil society. More than that: it offers them a kind of home—a place to speak, to connect, and to build alliances with activists and mentors who are working in their fields.

Jones and Robertson created One Young World because they believed there was a leadership vacuum in the world, and that young leaders could take us to a better place. The two partners wanted to create a platform that those young people could use to make their voices heard, and a catalyst for the development of both themselves and their projects. Despite all of the things that One Young World has achieved since 2009, both Jones and Robertson argue that we need exceptional young leaders even more today than then.

BLUE-SKY THINKING

Kofi Annan, far left, with members of Extremely Together, a joint initiative between the Kofi Annan Foundation, the European Commission and One Young World which has brought together young leaders from around the world to create youth-led solutions to violent extremism of all forms. Left to right, Ilwad Elman, Mimoun Berrissoun, Hajer Sharief, Hassan Ndugwa, Arizza Nocum and Bjørn Ihler.

And this year, on the eve of the 149th anniversary of Canada’s foundation, Ottawa played host to 1,300 delegates, gathered from across the globe, and Counsellors from Bob Geldof and Iron Maiden’s Bruce Dickinson to war reporter John Simpson. It was day one, and Mary, who was to speak passionately on climate change and the Paris Agr­eement at the opening ceremony in a few hours, chatted to us warmly. “Do you still drive?” I asked Loujain, who continues to live in Saudi Arabia and is now working on a campaign to abolish the stifling guardianship system in the kingdom. “I try not to,” she answered casually, noting that it was in Canada, as an 18-year-old student, that she first got behind the wheel of a car.

Meghan Markle, actress and UN Women Advocate, is in Ottawa as a One Young World Counsellor for the second time, though Canada is an adopted home of sorts as she spends much of the year filming in nearby Toronto. Meghan spends her time off doing humanitarian work. This coming year, she’ll travel to India as a global ambassador for World Vision, and she’s been in Rwanda over the past two years, working on gender equality. It’s about women knowing their worth, she says, and setting examples. “The energy is palpable and to be able to be part of that is an honour.”

That evening, Canada’s young prime minister Justin Trudeau welcomed all the Counsellors into the Library of Parli­ament, home to six hundred thousand volumes, as delegates gathered on the lawns outside the Gothic Revivalist parliament buildings. On the stage at Parliament Hill, Trudeau launched the Prime Minister’s Youth Council, calling its inaugural members up to join him. Among the 15 youngsters selected to meet several times a year and to advise their prime minister on issues ranging from employment to climate change was Hany al Moulia, a Syrian refugee recently resettled in Canada. Hany began to photograph life in a refugee camp in Lebanon, dis­covering a love of photo­graphy. Though he is a student and an actor, once Hany has finished studying, he ultimately hopes to become a journ­alist. “Art was a saving boat for me,” said Hany, who is legally blind, at the summit. “It was a place for my heart to feel good.”

Professor Muhammad Yunus, Nobel Peace Prize laureate, microfinance pion­eer and longtime supporter of One Young World, spoke to the 1,300 delegates to call upon them to influence the world they wished to create. Poverty wasn’t created by the poor, Yunus reminded the audience, but by unfair systems. So he decided to fight the systems. You are never too young to lead, echoed Kofi Annan, ex-UN Secretary-General, chair of the Kofi Annan Foundation and another Nobel Peace Prize laureate.

Below the stage, delegates carried the flags of the 196 countries represented. Meron Semedar, a refugee from Eritrea and a One Young World vet­eran, carried the refugee flag in the procession. It was the first time the flag had been carried in seven years of sum­mits. As Mary Robinson and Bob Geldof called attention to climate change and countries like Kiribati, which would not survive the rav­ages of global warming, the refugee flag—orange, for the colour of life vests, with a black stripe for the lives lost in dangerous crossings—called to memory the state­less, the largest number the world has known since the Second World War. Today, 65 million people are displaced.

Hussain Manawer, a 24-year-old YouTuber from Milford who won One Young World and Kruger Cowne’s Rising Star challenge in 2015 for his moving mental-health campaigning, returned to Ottawa this year with a couple of new projects under his belt. The prize will see Manawer become the first British Muslim in space, travelling l00km away from Earth. In between space training, Manawer has travelled to Macedonia, Calais, and Thessaloniki, taking supplies to refugee women and children. “We’re not setting a great example for generations to come,” says Manawer, “and it’s out of order.” It was this idea that led Manawer to get involved with Cher (“You know how when even your mum knows who someone is they’re a big deal? Even my mum knows who Cher is”) and the pop star’s effort to save Kaavan, a 30-year-old elephant languishing in Islamabad Zoo. Manawer visited Pakistan, where his family originally comes from, twice and was part of the effort to free the elephant, a gift to Pakistan’s former army chief from Sri Lanka. Cher only found about Kaavan because someone tweeted her and asked her to help. And in a conference heaving with millennials, the mobilizing powers of the internet took centre stage.

Emma Watson must be the median age of most One Young World delegates, but when the 26-year-old actress took to the stage in Ottawa, she spoke not as a seasoned hand, someone well used to commanding attention on international stages, but as a young campaigner like the others in the room. Two years after launching her high-profile initiative for gender equality, HeForShe, at the United Nations, Watson sifted through applications from One Young World activists from over 100 locations around the world to appoint her One Young World Scholars. One, Mina Tolu, a transgender activist from Malta, works at Transgender Europe, an NGO in Berlin, tracking, archiving and moni­toring violence faced by trans­gender cam­paigners across the globe. Because for all its inspirational, feelgood quotient, One Young World includes voices that are not necessarily the mean nor the most obvious, and it does not shy away from offering platforms to those whose stories are sobering and even shocking. Listening to Mina speak of working in “trans murder monitoring” during the moving LGBTQ plenary was one of those moments.

Jérôme Jarre began his public life as a Vine star. Cross-platform (in lay speak that means on Facebook, Insta­gram, Twitter, Vine and Snapchat) he connects to over 15 million followers. “After the Nice attacks, I wanted to do something,” said Jarre. “I asked everyone who follows me online to go out in the streets and actually try to connect to a stranger, whether it’s cooking for your neighbours, singing in the subway, dancing in the street for people, whatever people can do; but the point was bringing back trust. I asked all my followers to record themselves. I would share their clips so they could all inspire others to do the same.” He posted the call to kindness from the Philippines, where he was install­ing solar lights with Liter of Light, a local NGO he works with (last year, he and his followers raised over a million dollars for them). When Jarre landed back in France, he was hit by a huge wave of criticism, his first experience with the murky world of online trolling. It had never happened to Jarre before, he says because what he had been doing before was so “PG-13 and politically correct”. But instead of dis­couraging him, the abuse inspired him to scale the idea. He sent flowers to mosques and went to install solar lights for 115 refugee settle­ments in Dunkirk (again in collaboration with Liter of Light) where only a third of the refugee houses had light, adding to the often dangerous and insecure environment in the camps (“Why wasn’t the govern­ment doing it?” he asked). He kept pushing his young followers to respond with love. “Together we can stand against hate and be a lobby of the youth. We don’t want that our countries bomb other countries. We don’t want that. Who is being sent to war, anyway? The youth. Who decides to send them? Not the youth. Together, collectively, I believe the youth is ready to put a lot of pressure for peace and get it.”

Elbi means “my heart” in Arabic, but Natalia Vodianova stumbled across the name for her new philanthropic app by accident. It came from LB: Love Button. The model and philanthropist launched the app a week before coming to Ottawa based on the idea that in a universe motivated by likes, she wanted to turn hits into something more than just popularity, and more along the lines of philanthropy. Elbi is a free app that will constantly rot­ate three “stories” from organizations doing charitable work around the world. Every like the organization’s story gets translates into a micro-donation of $1. “It’s a love, not a like,” Natalia corrected me, “because if you really love something, you’ll put a little money behind it for a good cause.”

PUT OUT THE FLAGS

Cher, centre, with One Young World delegates. Left to right: Nkonde Racheal Chenda, Aliçia Raimundo, Barkha Mossae, Hussain Manawer, Meron Semedar, Antoine Pouliot, Robert Jakobi, Mark Cowne (seated) of Kruger Cowne, whose Rising Star Programme selects three exceptional young people annually to take the stage at One Young World, and his son Rees Cowne

As we spoke, Natalia took out her phone to show me one of the Elbi stories that morning, from an initiative in Uganda. All Elbi users build up points based on the fundraising and sharing they do, and Natalia hopes that one day social media users will be as proud of their Elbi points as their number of followers. “It’s a little action, but with a big difference,” she said, adding that her aim is not just to connect people to a culture of caring at nano levels, but to turn one per cent of the five billion likes on Facebook daily into actual donations. “Then I’ll be happy.” It’s all about changing the way we see things—something that Frederick Blackford and Tommy Stadlen’s Polaroid Swing app, in which Vodianova was one of the first investors, aims to do. At Ottawa, Frederick presented the app at a special session, Ambassadors in Action.

Sitting in the Fairmont Hotel amid the bustle of One Young World volunteers and delegates rushing by, I asked James Chau, a UN AIDS goodwill ambassador and special contributor to China’s CCTV, why he comes back every year. He thought for a moment and then told me about the 28-year-old he introduced in his session on peace and security who founded the Sarajevo War Childhood Museum. Jasminko Halilovic was a child when the war started in his country. “I asked him what I asked Mugabe, Su Kyi, and Winnie Mandela,” Chau says: “‘What is your earliest childhood memory?’ And Halilovic spoke of moving homes when the conflict was raging. Moving, moving, always moving.” It was that sentiment that led Halilovic to start collecting artefacts. His first item was a book of recollections: the seed of a collection that grew to over 3,000 pieces: toys, clothing, diaries, photos. As of last December, the War Childhood museum is a permanent collection, housed in a space bequeathed by the Sarajevo muni­cipality. James reflected for a moment, and then returned to my question.

“I come back every year for the friendships,” he said, “and to share what I’m still learning with people at more critical cross points than I am.”